Triple H Discusses Transition to the Desk, Performance Center & More

Triple H spoke with Greg And The Morning Buzz. Here are some highlights.

Returning to the ring: “I’m not back in the ring yet, but I expect it to be broken [his time out of the ring] shortly, probably.”

Being busier now than ever: “It’s so much busier now. Then, it was hectic. It was busy. I don’t want to say it wasn’t busy, but it was just a lot of travel, a lot of being here and being there. Now, it’s trying to do all that, but [also] juggle all these other things, the corporate responsibility, and trying to be…trying to learn a whole new world, being an executive and not just being one of the performers. As much as people think I like doing it, it’s hard, man. When Vince will ask to put us back in the show, it’s really difficult to do all the things you have to do behind the scenes all day long, and then right before, it’s almost invariably every week, right before RAW goes on the air, like 20 minutes before, I’m like, what am I doing again?

“I’ve been putting together everybody else’s stuff, organizing and getting the show going all day long, and doing all the things that I have to do all day long and dealing with everything else, and your stuff tends to come last. I have to put it all together. It’s just funny now on Monday nights because Steph’s the same way. When she’s there, we have to grab each other like 20, 30 minutes before we go live and just like, alright, we have to get our own stuff here. What are we doing?”

Up and coming stars catching his eye: “We got a ton of guys. I look at the last year, and especially for me, that’s really one of the things that I do that I like the most, helping the young talent and developing the young talent and stuff, and in the last year The Shield have all come up, and that’s a massive group of three, just immensely talented guys that are all going to be massive stars, already are. The Wyatts, again, three more guys that are just incredibly talented and destined for huge things. This weekend we had a new Intercontinental Champion, Big E. Langston. Here’s a guy that came up in the past year that has just made phenomenal strides. We have a lot guys. For all of them, we have 80 talent or so sitting down, or more, depending on the time, sitting down in developmental just chomping at the bit for the opportunity. I

“t’s great. It’s really created a competitive environment and for people interested in that, seeing where these guys come from, we have a show, right now it airs on Hulu, but it’s called NXT. NXT is basically a show that, it’s all our developmental talent. If you were watching it a year and a half ago, you would’ve seen the Shield, you would have seen the Wyatts, you would have seen Big E. Langston, all those guys, as they were coming up in the developmental system, before they got to the main roster. It’s a really cool opportunity to see them before.”

Shawne Merriman at the Performance Center: “He kind of wanted to keep it down low, and he was like hey. He didn’t want anybody to know he was there, you know? While we were there he was like, you mind if I throw this up, like take a shot of this and put it on Twitter, and I’m like, I thought you didn’t want anybody to know you were here? Oh no, I’m just going to throw it up on my Twitter account. [laughter] I’m like, dude, you put this place up on your Twitter account, it’ll be all over the globe in like five minutes.”

If he thought Total Divas would be as successful as it has become: “We hoped it would. It’s one of those things that for years we’ve said listen, as much as people enjoy the day to day shows and what we do as a show, if they knew the behind the scenes and they saw some of these people behind the scenes…I don’t know. I’m not a fan of reality television. I find those shows mind numbing, to me. I just don’t have the time to watch them, but there’s a big audience for it. When I watch those shows I think, my God, if people are interested in this, if they knew the real [story], what goes on with most of our talent and their day to day dramas and all of the stuff that goes on, it’s just, there are shows sitting there. I think the Divas was the first foray into that and it’s wildly successful.”

How he works out with his schedule: “It’s hard. We’ll go home at night and we try to get there in order to play with the kids a little bit and get em to bed, and then it’s head downstairs, get the trainer, get the workout in, get done training about 12:30, 1:00 at night, hit the rack. We don’t get a whole lot of sleep. That’s the one thing that sacrifices.

“There’s this self help guru, I can’t think of his name right now off the top of my head. He has this whole thing where he says if you want to be successful, you’ve got to want it like you want to breath. If you’re going to be successful you’ve got to be willing to give up sleep and a lot of people aren’t willing to do that. It’s the truth. There’s going to be times where, times where I look at it and go ugh, there’s nothing I want more than to just lay down and crash, I have to train for two hours. So I go train and I get four hours of sleep instead of six. It’s just what you have to do, man.”

If it’s tough to make the transition from in the ring to behind the scenes: “Yeah, it was. I think some people think I just come here and then I give my opinions on what the product is going to be creatively or something. I really don’t have anything to do with that. I have so many things to do with all these departments that are mine, but no different than any other executive in the company, and that’s what’s expected of me, is to be no different than any other executive. So, I have to go from being a professional athlete without a job, basically, from some stance that’s how you can look at it, right? I went to the ring and played wrestler every night, to coming here and having a full time executive gig working with other executives and it was a steep learning curve. It still is. You learn everyday. It was a cool challenge for me. It was hard and it was a big transition and yeah, there were days when I felt like the lion in the cage, like I have to get out of this office, but it was a really cool challenge to take on something different and in a completely different way. You have to learn how to communicate with people even differently. You can’t come in here and talk like you’re talking in the locker room.”